learning without awareness
a phenomenon said to occur when an individual’s behavior has been affected without that individual being aware of the conditions affecting the behavior, of the relationship between those conditions and the behavior, or of the fact that the behavior has changed. The existence of such learning is controversial but evidence has been found in classical conditioning, procedural learning, implicit learning, and subliminal learning. However, the critical data for assessing awareness depend on experimental participants’ verbal reports that they are unable to describe the learning experience to which they were exposed.